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→Liberalization, political, military and agricultural reforms
Confirmed in power and his new role, Khrushchev promoted and set a new policy of “Reform Communism” throughout the Soviet Union. In an attempt to humanize the Soviet system – but without sacrificing its ideology – he placed greater emphasis on producing consumer goods, in contrast to the Stalinist emphasis on heavy industry. Khrushchev began seeing the US and the West much more as a rival instead of an evil entity. He aimed at showing off the superiority of Soviet over American and Western products. This position further alienated Mao Zedong. As the Chinese Cultural Revolution proceeded, there was no worse insult than to be scorned for being a "Chinese Khrushchev," the equivalent of an ideological turncoat. Unsurprisingly, during the following years, all this also led to further alienation with the People’s Republic of China and what would soon become their own "Cold War" triggered by the Sino-Soviet Split in 1960.
====Liberalization, political, military and agricultural reforms====During Khrushchev’s time in office, for the first time, the Party leadership permitted Soviet tourists to go overseas, and Khrushchev often seemed amenable to widening exchanges with both socialist and capitalist countries. Furthermore, by 1954 Khrushchev effectively managed to reform the Stalinist security apparatus by subordinating it to the top party leadership. He divided Stalin’s Ministry of Internal Affairs into criminal police and security services – KGB (now Federal Security Service – FSB), which in turn reported directly to the U.S.S.R’s Council of Ministers. The head of KGB was also Khrushchev’s nominee. However, the Soviet military bitterly resisted Khrushchev’s desire to reduce conventional armaments in favor of nuclear missiles. His attempted decentralization of the party structure begun antagonizing many of those who had previously supported his own rise to power. According to various authors, political terror as an everyday method of government was replaced under Khrushchev by his administrative means of repression.
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In 1958, Khrushchev for the first time opened a public Central Committee meeting to hundreds of Soviet officials. This, however, actually expansion of the Central Committee allowed Khrushchev even greater control, since any dissenters . Anyone who dissented from him would have to make their case in front of a large, disapproving crowd. By this time, after all, the Communist Party had solidified into the so-called nomenclature – 10 million-strong elite of bureaucrats, managers , and technicians intending on guarding their power and prerogatives at all cost. <ref>Nikita Khrushchev: Domestic policies - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev#Domestic_policies</ref>
The central crisis of Khrushchev’s administration, however, was agriculture. He optimistically based many plans on the crops in 1956 and 1958, which fueled his repeated promises to overtake the United States in both agricultural and industrial production. He opened up more than 70 million acres of virgin land in Siberia and send thousands of laborers, but this plan was unsuccessful, and the Soviet Union soon had to import wheat from Canada and the US once again. Khrushchev was convinced and believed that he could solve the Soviet Union’s agricultural crises through the planting of corn on the same scale as the United States, though failing to realize that the differences in climate and soil made this strongly inadvisable.
==Khrushchev foreign and defense policies: on the brink of nuclear war==
